First Chalkboard Frame

Making your own chalk board is all the rage these days in DIY blog land, so I decided to try it out myself. I started with all of the necessary items:

Unique vintage frame found cheaply at a garage sale

Leftover paint from a previous project

A small piece of plywood cut to size with a jigsaw

Chalkboard paint, chalk

And some polyurethane

This is what I started with

The frame is a pretty good wood fake, but it’s actually some kind of compressed wood something, not solid.

The sweet yellow paint was left over from a dresser I had painted for a friend. I LOVE the color.

Once I did two coats of the yellow I added a couple coats of polyurethane to seal it. I had read from another blog that polyurethane will become darker yellow over time and should only be used on wood or darker colors that won’t show the yellowing. I thought the frame was a little two pastel, so I thought the yellowing might actually be good for it.

There is the finished product! You can read about the owl cabinet here. The whole project was pretty simple. One thing that is really important with making chalkboards is that once the paint is dried, you should go over the whole surface with chalk. Otherwise, the first few things that you write on it will show up forever. My dad taught me that!